The effect of regular walks on various health aspects in older people with dementia: protocol of a randomized-controlled trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Physical activity has proven to be beneficial for physical functioning, cognition, depression, anxiety, rest-activity rhythm, quality of life (QoL), activities of daily living (ADL) and pain in older people. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of walking regularly on physical functioning, the progressive cognitive decline, level of depression, anxiety, rest-activity rhythm, QoL, ADL and pain in older people with dementia.</p> <p>Methods/design</p> <p>This study is a longitudinal randomized controlled, single blind study. Ambulatory older people with dementia, who are regular visitors of daily care or living in a home for the elderly or nursing home in the Netherlands, will be randomly allocated to the experimental or control condition. Participants of the experimental group make supervised walks of 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, as part of their daily nursing care. Participants of the control group will come together three times a week for tea or other sedentary activities to control for possible positive effects of social interaction. All dependent variables will be assessed at baseline and after 6 weeks, and 3, 6, 9, 12 and 18 months of intervention.</p> <p>The dependent variables include neuropsychological tests to assess cognition, physical tests to determine physical functioning, questionnaires to assess ADL, QoL, level of depression and anxiety, actigraphy to assess rest-activity rhythm and pain scales to determine pain levels. Potential moderating variables at baseline are: socio-demographic characteristics, body mass index, subtype of dementia, apolipoprotein E (ApoE) genotype, medication use and comorbidities.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>This study evaluates the effect of regular walking as a treatment for older people with dementia. The strength of this study is that 1) it has a longitudinal design with multiple repeated measurements, 2) we assess many different health aspects, 3) the intervention is not performed by research staff, but by nursing staff which enables it to become a routine in usual care. Possible limitations of the study are that 1) only active minded institutions are willing to participate creating a selection bias, 2) the drop-out rate will be high in this population, 3) not all participants will be able to perform/understand all tests.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p><a href="http://www.trialregister.nl/trialreg/admin/rctview.asp?TC=1482">NTR1482</a></p

'Respect Study' the Treatment of Religious Difference and Otherness: An ethnographic investigation in UK schools

Understanding and appreciating the beliefs and practices of others feature prominently among the aims and purposes of Religious Education in UK schools. Drawing on ethnographic data from the ‘Does RE Work?’ project, this paper presents two conceptions if ‘in/entoleration’ a deliberate process of inculcating tolerance in pedagogy. Entoleration, akin to enculturation, encourages sympathetic and transformative encounter with others’ beliefs. Intoleration, akin to indoctrination, risks eliding both difference and encounter in the service of a pre-determined aim of nurturing uncritical tolerance. The former is categorised by pedagogies of encounter with the other as person, while the latter often focuses on externals and strangeness

Short-term sequestration of slurry-derived carbon into particle size fractions of a temperate grassland soil

Surface application of animal wastes in intensive grassland systems has caused growing environmental problems during the last decade and, therefore, increasing public and scientific concern. In the present study we examined if the natural abundance 13C stable isotope tracer techniques could be used to investigate a poorly defined aspect of waste application, i.e. incorporation of slurry-derived C and its distribution in soil organic matter (SOM) fractions with different turnover times of a pasture soil. C3 and C4 slurries (δ13CV-PDB = −30.7‰ and −21.3‰, respectively) from cows fed either on a maize (C4) or perennial ryegrass (C3) diet were applied to a C3 soil with a δ13C value of −30.0 ± 0.2‰. The cattle slurry was applied at 50 m3 ha−1. Coarse sand, fine sand, silt, clay and fine clay were isolated from bulk soil samples (0–2 cm depth), freeze-dried and ground prior to total organic C (TOC) using elemental analysis and 13C natural abundance analysis by isotope-ratio mass spectrometry. The stable isotope tracer technique did allow to quantify the short-term sequestration of slurry-derived C in particle-size fractions of the grassland soil. Slurry-derived carbon was sequestered in various amounts in the five particle-size fractions, but most of it was sequestered in the coarse sand fraction during the two week experiment. The preferential input into the coarse sand fraction suggests that only the larger particulate slurry-derived materials were trapped into the soil during the experimental period. Less than 40% of the applied slurry-derived C was sequestered into the soil, suggesting a potential for large losses into the wider environment. The practice of surface spreading of slurry to temperate grassland soils is clearly not efficient, and improvements in slurry application methods, such as incorporation directly into the soil, should therefore be encouraged